No. That's why my current laptop is still a heavily upgraded Lenovo X201. 16:10 screen, classic keyboard, trackpad with buttons. However, as a 1st gen Core i5, it's beginning to show its age, and the battery life is poor now.

guardian452 wrote:

Trippynet wrote:I do NOT want a crappy, cheapo watching-TV-oriented 16:9 panel on my laptop - period. Apple manage to make 16:10 laptops still, and both Microsoft and Huawei make laptops with 3:2 screens

This I don't understand. Why get so angry at Lenovo, and instead just buy an (Apple/Microsoft/Huawei)? If that's your sword to fall on there are plenty of options in the screen department.

I'm annoyed because it promised so much. There were several polls with a huge amount in favour of anything but a 16:9 screen, major preference for the return of the status LEDs (lack of status LEDs on my work T440 is really annoying). They claimed to be pursuing a classic Thinkpad with modern components inside, and it got a lot of people justifiably excited. If the recent revelations are to be believed, it's a cheap cop-out. It's just a modern Thinkpad with a classic keyboard and a few fancy transfers stuck on it. If so, it'll be a huge disappointment to what a lot of people were hoping for.

For the others, Apple now solder everything down, and still don't offer a matte screen (as much as I like a 16:10 screen, I hate glossy panels). Plus the keyboard is average and the trackpad is poor. The Huawei Matebook has a nice size screen, but again it's only available in a glossy finish, and the trackpad is poor. Microsoft, also only glossy panels, and everything soldered in place and filled with even more glue and plastic spot welds than Apple manages these days.

The main annoyance IMO is that all of the components are out there. Lenovo have shown it's possible to put a classic keyboard into a new laptop, and even their chiclet keyboards aren't actually that bad compared to everyone else. Dell still make most of the Latitudes with excellent touchpads that have proper buttons (I love the trackpad on my other work machine, a Latitude 5570). Apple/Huawei/Microsoft have shown that 16:10 or 3:2 screens are possible, and plenty of companies make laptops with matte screens.

It's such a pity that nobody can put these together into one laptop. A system with a matte screen that is 16:10 or 3:2, a decent keyboard, a good trackpad, and a few status LEDs.

I still hope the reports are wrong about the ThinkPad Classic, but if they're correct, I'll be keeping my X201 a bit longer still I guess.

13 UKP on ebay.co.uk got me a XEON X3220 @2.40 Ghz to replace the Pentium G915 @2.80 Ghz in the PeeCee I threw together from old parts I had strewn about the house. My primitive benchmarking seem to suggest it's now 4-5x faster on compute bound tasks.

guardian452 wrote:This I don't understand. Why get so angry at Lenovo, and instead just buy an (Apple/Microsoft/Huawei)? If that's your sword to fall on there are plenty of options in the screen department.

I mean, I'm not married to the idea of buying ThinkPads. It's just that everywhere I look, the laptop market these days is stuck on terrible fucking design ideas. Fortunately we're starting to get some less ridiculous aspect ratios available compared to a few years back when it was 16:9 from horizon to horizon, but the Apple-driven push for OMFG SO THIN!!!1 as the primary determinant of laptop quality has still left the market tainted with garbage chiclet keyboards, borderless trackpads without discrete buttons (no, fuck you, industry, your "clickpads" are shit and can burn in Hell,) tiny power connectors that wear to the point of unusability in a year, etc. etc.

For me, its mainly for portability. I travel a lot on work, and also when visiting family. Having a laptop keeps me entertained on flights, gives me access to a few games and bits, plus it's useful for Skype calls to family as well. Mine doesn't get used much in the house (Skype aside), but is handy when I'm away from home!

For the price of that mac pro you could buy a laptop that will literally run rings around it. Your argument for 'bang for the buck' was valid, had you not outed yourself as a MacPro6,1 owner

Trippynet wrote:Apple now solder everything down, and still don't offer a matte screen (as much as I like a 16:10 screen, I hate glossy panels).

Sad that you think that, the retina macbooks have the best anti-glare coating in the industry, second only to the ipad pro.

I replaced the chintzy matte cover on one of our thinkpad x1's because it was damaged, with a $15 illumishield, much improvement over the $49 lenovo matte cover. I have illumishield brand matte cover on my razer as well, razer's do NOT have a good AG coating tho this picture is from my old stealth (I have a 13" now, my 12" started acting strangely so I sold it before it completely died)

Complaining that you can't get a 1st party matte cover is more than a little silly, especially for macbooks which are so popular there are dozens of options for them (tho as I mentioned, the AG is so good IDK why you would bother).

Dodoid wrote:What I am suggesting is that the clean image from Microsoft or Apple already contains a decent amount of privacy-invasive online data collection software.

But it's in the EULA, this is very different from what lenovo did. Industry-standard telemetry is different from breaking practically all web security and not disclosing it.

guardian452 wrote:For the price of that mac pro you could buy a laptop that will literally run rings around it. Your argument for 'bang for the buck' was valid, had you not outed yourself as a MacPro6,1 owner

I accept the fact that you like laptops over desktops.(we all have the right to choose the type of system we like using)

I personally just don't like the feel of Laptops (I tend to feel cramped when using them) and the fact that they are even less upgradable than a Map Pro for instance doesn't help.

The GPU's in the Mac Pro 2013 may not be upgradable, but just about everything else is though, if you have the technical know-how, meaning that it's life can be extended and I personally like that fact.

We must all just accept that different people have different preferences.(myself included)

Last edited by Irinikus on Mon Sep 25, 2017 6:36 am, edited 4 times in total.

You can pull up your CPU benchmark of choice but bear in mind the cheapest GPU in any of those machines will outperform the D700 in the mac pro. Tho the dell probably has an integrated option so maybe not.

I agree with you that GPU's have come along way since the GPU offerings made available on the Mac Pro.

Just remember that I've been using this machine since 2014 and that by upgrading it I will still be able to push it for quit a few more years, without having to go and spend more money unnecessarily, whereas if I had bought the MacBook Pro that was current back then, I wouldn't be in as good a positions I am now.

I used to play lots of games and as a result, GPU's were the only thing of importance as far as I was concerned.

Nowadays I hardly play games at all and as a result GPU performance isn't as important to me, even though I have argued on the Apple thread that a GPU refresh for the Mac Pro would have been nice.

According to Apple, the Mac Pro can run three 5K displays, and thats enough as far as I'm concerned.

Im sorry for pushing my own opinion, as you are perfectly entitled to yours.

Last edited by Irinikus on Mon Sep 25, 2017 6:45 am, edited 1 time in total.

guardian452 wrote:For the price of that mac pro you could buy a laptop that will literally run rings around it. Your argument for 'bang for the buck' was valid, had you not outed yourself as a MacPro6,1 owner

I accept the fact that you like laptops over desktops.(we all have the right to chase the type of system we like using)

I personally just don't like the feel of Laptops and the fact that they are even less upgradable than a Map Pro for instance doesn't help.

The GPU's in the Mac Pro 2013 may not be upgradable, but just about everything else is though, if you have the technical know-how, meaning that it's life can be extended and I personally like that fact.

We must all just accept that different people have different preferences.(myself included)

I've done some upgrades (cpu*, ram*, ssd) to my macbook, I've done some upgrades (wifi, ssd, screen cover, eGPU) to my razer. *- by selling the old one and buying a new one.

I like my thinkpads (x220, w520) but honestly I've upgraded them as far as they can practically go short of getting crazy with a new motherboard and they are really long in the tooth. These are kind of the last of the 'old school' thinkpads (very similar to the '30 series excepting the keyboard) I use the w520 exclusively for a legacy app on windows 7, the x220 is basically a linux toy. I also miss hardware like this but it's clear that nobody is going to make a machine like that again, except for panasonic and they are extremely expensive for what you get (we have a CF-53 @ work and it has too many compromises to be practical).

One thing nobody would argue is that the mp6,1 is a very unique machine. What it does, it does very well. Like a modern day O2. Too bad it wasn't more successful because a variety of options is always a good thing.

Irinikus wrote:I agree with you that GPU's have come along way since the GPU offerings made available on the Mac Pro.

I used to play lots of games and as a result, GPU's were the only thing of importance as far as I was concerned.

I have a nintendo for that. I can't stand most PC gamers, I don't like the upgrade treadmill it forces, I don't like having to put up with system incompatibility etc.

One thing that we can all probably agree upon I suppose, is that It doesn't pay to chase the latest hardware (as I've done in the past), unless it gives you a notable advantage in the industry that you work in, as it's always bettered by something much cheaper in the not too distant future.